A Day Is Like 1000 Years? Not Exactly

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. 2 Peter 3:8-9

Today’s Reading: Ezekiel 40-41; 2 Peter 3

So with the Lord a thousands years can be like a day and a day like a thousand years huh? That makes me think…

So you know the whole bit about God being omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent? It makes sense to me in this context, at least the omniscient and omnipresent part.

So imagine if you were in all places at the same time with the ability to take in all of the information that you experienced.
This would make you all knowing and all present as stated above. How much time would even just one second of experience on this earth represent in total time experienced for you as this extremely awesome being? Well I just did the math…

When I last checked the world population clock there were 6,923,472,432 people living in the world. So how much collective life experience is there when each of these people lives for just 1 second? To see that let’s look at how many seconds there are in a year, divide that by the total population and we’ll get a sense of how many “years” we all collectively experience in a single second on earth.

There are…

60 seconds in a minute

60 minutes in an hour

24 hours in a day

365 days in a year (assuming it is not a leap year).

This means that there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year (the real number takes into account the leap year and other fancy scientific factors… but let’s use the number we have cause… well… because it looks nicer).

If we divide the world population by this number then we get 219.5 total years of life experienced by all of the people on this earth in a single second of time.

 If God is there for all of it then good gracious is he racking up years of experience at a stupid fast pace. No wonder why he’s so wise.

But of course the passage is that a day is like a thousand years. That’s easy, divide the total population by 365 and you get 18,968,417. So really a day is more like 18 million years… not a thousand.

After backing out the numbers and doing some fuzzy reverse logic math (algebra) I discovered that a day was like a thousand years for God when there were 365,000 people on earth. And since it is estimated that there were more than 150 million people on the earth around the time that these words were written you gotta go way back to when the population was that low.

I did this exercise for two reasons. 1. I’m a nerd.. and 2. I think it’s interesting to make some of these ideas really concrete. What are we saying when we say that God is omniscient and omnipresent? What would that have to mean for us if we had that job?

All I know is that if I were God I’d be tired of y’all by now. I’m glad that ain’t my job.